More Innovative Ideas to Create Impact-Then What?

This past weekend was the third annual GiveBackHack, a weekend event that draws together social innovators to develop a social enterprise concept in an intense 48 hour team effort.

Over the weekend, dozens of business concepts are worked on and vetted until Sunday evening, when each team offers a brief presentation of their concept and a panel of judges identifies those they feel have the most potential.

Some of the concepts that rose to the top were

Brake the Cycle – to provide jobs and training to ex-offenders through bicycle repair

Bust a Move – sports bras for girls that are practical and affordable

Ears On – recycling and refurbishing hearing aids for low income foks

Friendly App – a YELP or BBB for the LBGTQ community

My Family Nurse – UBER for nursing help

DACA Time – Turbotax for Dreamers filing complex Federal paper forms

But this by no means implies other concepts won’t also rise to the top as the ideas percolate and develop further.

The challenge of a weekend program, however, is what to do next. The unbelievably high energy of a weekend event can lose momentum quickly without some structure and guidance to hold the team and its energy together.

Working with GiveBackHack, the Center for Social Enterprise Development is taking a whack at the hack by offering the weekend participants an evening of structure. We name this trial program “Next Steps” because that is the challenge of weekend events: what should be the next steps? At this event we will offer a simple structure for what the teams should do next, as well as what they should not do yet. In addition, we will offer a panel of social enterprise lenders to offer straight talk about where the concept needs to be — and what the lenders need to see — before it is worthwhile for an entrepreneur to start talking about funding and capitalizing the business. As a first checkpoint, I am quite impressed by www.venturize.org as a filter for a startup to use to know what types of funders they are sufficiently prepared to approach.

We will see how well Next Steps is at providing some postpartum structure to weekend hacks. At a minimum, participants will get some free beer at the end!